Social
environments and their effects on theory-of-mind development
Connie
Cheung
This research examines how children’s social milieu can affect their theory-of-mind development, or their understanding that human behaviour is motivated by internal mental states such as thoughts, emotions and desires. Specifically, we focus on how culture and poverty may play a role in affecting different factors such as parent-child conversations and children’s language ability. Most importantly, we are interested in examining how these differences may affect theory-of-mind development in children of different cultures and families living in poverty.
Children’s
understanding of intentions when reasoning about moral behaviours
Ivy
Chiu Loke
This research examines the development of young children’s ability to use information about intentional causation to evaluate and judge someone else’s moral behaviour. Using a novel task, this research assesses children’s understanding of the causal relation between prior intentions, intentions-in-action, and outcomes when reasoning about others’ actions. This research also explores the relation between children’s theory-of-mind understanding and developing moral reasoning.
Individual
differences in narrative perspective-taking and theory of mind
Julie
Comay
This research examines relations among language development, narrative production, and social reasoning in four- to seven-year-old children. Hypothesizing that the ability to effectively narrate a story requires psychological as well as linguistic expertise, the study looks at children’s developing ability to represent perspective in storytelling, both internally (in depicting character perspective) and from outside the story-frame (in accommodating the viewpoint of an audience). We are examining the independent contributions of language, memory, and theory-of-mind abilities to this narrative understanding.
Children’s
reasoning about social rules and roles
Lisa Ain Dack
This research looks at 3- and 4-year-old children’s reasoning about rules (e.g., “if it’s raining outside then the boy has to wear his boots”) and about facts (e.g., “if it’s raining outside then the boy always wears his boots”), to see whether children reason better about one than the other. We are also examining the link between children’s reasoning about rules and facts and their theory-of-mind reasoning.